The most popular track and it’s self-similarity (homework week 8)

This is a self-similarity matrix for Bring Me The Horizon’s most popular song Can You Feel My Heart. The beginning of the song, up to approximately 125 seconds, has a clear pattern. There is a distinct melody that is repeated and alternated by singing accompanied by a calmer melody, functioning as a verse and chorus pattern. This forms a clear checkerboard pattern. At about 125 seconds the bridge sets in and the distinct melody of the chorus is not heard again until a little snippet around 180 seconds, followed by a little ‘individual’ section of heavy guitar music, which forms the small dark square the self-similarity matrix shows on the top right. The melody from the chorus sets in again at about 200 seconds. Here we can see a checkerboard pattern, like the one in the beginning of the song, starting to reappear.

Another popular track and it’s self-similarity (homework week 8)

This is a self-similarity matrix for another highly popular Bring Me The Horizon song, named Kingslayer, which they recorded together with the Japanese group BABYMETAL. Comparing this to Can You Feel My Heart, we can see that it is overall more homogenous. There is a clearer checkerboard pattern and the different sections are more similar to each other all throughout the song. Although, there are also more moments in the song that are different from all the other parts, which you can see from the bright criss-crossing lines.

Bring Me The Horizon: different music styles over the years compared

For this plot I have split Bring Me The Horizon’s music into three different categories, “Old Music”, their first four albums, “New music”, their three most recent releases, with exception of their experimental music from Music to listen to~, which is the third category. This album isn’t exactly representative of either their “new” or “old” music style, so I made it a separate category (hence “Experimental”). It is easily visible that BMTH’s new music is much more varied than their old music. Considering that high energy + low valence = angry music, and high energy + high valence = happy music, we could conclude that their music has overall become happier. The experimental music has very low valence values, like BMTH’s old music, and is also more angry and negative. Each category seems to have outliers that fall into the ‘sad music’ area, they are labeled in the plot.

With the highest danceability score being 0.6 out of a possible maximum of 1, most of their music isn’t very danceable, but their newer music generally scores higher. The speechiness seems to be higher with higher valence scores, but generally the music doesn’t seem very speechy. Looking at all their work together, the music seems very energetic and seems to have progressed from negative and angry towards a more diverse and positive style, with almost a kind of “dip” back towards negativity in their experimental album.

The saddest song in Bring Me The Horizon’s repertoire

This is a chromagram of the song Memorial, which is, according to it’s measurements of valence and energy, the saddest song in Bring Me The Horizon’s entire repertoire. As you can see, the song is quite repetitive and has a few layers that really stand out. Memorial is an entirely instrumental song with a continuous underlying sound and is used in the album as a transition into the next track. There are clearly audible, and in the chromagram visible, high and loud ‘screeching’ noises in the song and a few notes that are softly and repeatedly being played throughout the song. The texture of the song is very simple and also very clearly repesented in this chromagram.

The happiest song in Bring Me The Horizon’s repertoire

This is a chromagram of the song 1x1 (feat. Nova Twins), which is, according to it’s measurements of valence and energy, the happiest song in Bring Me The Horizon’s entire repertoire. As you can see, this song is all over the place. The line of C#/Db stands out a little bit, with a higher magnitude overall. The song consists of heavy drums and guitar combined with electronic music and keyboard sounds, all accompanied by the singing voices of either Bring Me The Horizon’s frontman Oliver Sykes or the featuring artist the Nova Twins. The only big visible thing that is happening here is at around 160 seconds, where the heavy instruments that support the rest of the song go quiet and we hear only a keyboard and a singing voice.

Cepstrograms

Cepstrograms for the songs that lay the closes to the average energy, valence and danceability in BMTH’s old music (Sleep With One Eye Open) and new music (Ouch). As you can see the cepstrograms both have more intensity in the bottom, but Sleep With One Eye Open is “squished down” even more than Ouch. Both songs have a focus on the c02 section and generally go up to c06. Even though both songs do not have a lot of intensity in c07 to 12, Ouch does seem to have a bit more intensity there than Sleep With One Eye Open. This shows that the timbre features of the songs are quite different from each other.